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The Paparazzi Project Paparazzi is a free and open-source hardware and software project intended to create an exceptionally powerful and versatile autopilot system by allowing and encouraging input from the community. The project includes not only the airborne hardware and software, from voltage regulators and GPS receivers to Kalman filtering code, but also a powerful and ever-expanding array of ground hardware and software including modems, antennas, and a highly evolved user-friendly ground control software interface. All hardware and software is open-source and freely available to anyone under the GNU licencing agreement. Efforts are currently underway to organize production and retail sales of the autopilot and popular accessories, making the system much easier and more affordable for all. The key feature of the paparazzi autopilot is its unique combination of infrared thermopiles and inertial measurement for attitude sensing, providing a robust and accurate attitude estimate that requires no ground calibration and can recover from any launch attitude. The Paparazzi project at ENAC The Paparazzi mini UAV project is now being used and developed at ENAC University. A debian repository containing some packages not in the official distribution and required to run Paparazzi. PaparazziX Knoppix based live CD is available from the paparazzix directory. Nightly and release tarballs. News March 26, 2008 Paparazzi flying on Spitsbergen Scientists from the Geophysical Institute of the University of Bergen/Norway flew Paparazzi controlled Funjet aircrafts equipped with meteorological sensors in the Arctic sea around Spitsbergen only with the help of a RC safety pilot and no Paparazzi team member nearby. They took off and landed on the helicopter deck of the Norwegian icebreaking coast guard vessel KV Svalbard for one week and set a new Paparazzi low temperature record by flying at around -20°C and 15m/s wind in altitudes up to 1500m. For another two weeks they also collected data on Spitsbergen near Longyearbyen. March 15, 2008 Tiny 2.11 The assembled Tiny 2.11 and some infrared sensor boards are now available for sale from onefastdaddy.com. More details on the Get_Hardware page. February 6, 2008 Paparazzi running on eeePC Looking for a small, light and cheap ground station ? Paparazzi runs on the [ASUS eeePC] out of the box (after installing the Debian Paparazzi packages). Tested on the pre-installed Xandros distribution, on a standard Ubuntu and on the preconfigured [eeeXubuntu]. January 27, 2008 Paparazzi's Storm on TV ,Turkey Storm on TV, One of the Paparazzi Aircraft is on the biggest Television of Turkey. (We are sorry that all in Turkish...) December 27, 2007 Paparazzi Control Station next to Toulouse, France From the 24C3 conference, Paparazzi aircraft operated in Hildesheim, Germany and in Castagnac, France (the station in Istanbul, Turkey was lacking a security pilot) were remote controlled in real time by Martin and Antoine. The three local ground control stations and the remote one in Berlin were connected to a central server (located in Germany). Video from the 2 aircraft was also visible from the conference room in real-time. A great team work and ... a lot of fun. See media section for some press coverage. The session video is available as torrent here in Matroska or MPEG-4 format and this are the presentation slides. December 13, 2007 Tiny v2.1 in a Funjet The new Tiny 2.1 autopilot nicely flew in a Funjet for the first time. September 21st, 2007 Antoine launching the Storm1 MAV 07 was yet another great success for the project! Paparazzi teams took 1st, 3rd, 4th, and 5th places in the outdoor autonomous surveillance competition and were honored to share the 1st place award with the very well designed Micropilot-equipped 48cm Ping Wing from Linköping University in Sweden. The first Paparazzi helicopter, Twisted Logic proved that a passively stable helicopter could operate well in mild outdoor winds and also took 2nd place in the indoor competition, surpassed only by the "Father of passively stable helicopters", world famous Petter Muren of Proxflyer and BladeRunner fame. The team of Christian Lindenberg and (fake) Martin Müller also won the special award from the jury for it general performance and fair spirit. September 17th, 2007 MAV 07 MAV 07 will be held in Toulouse, France (of course!) September 17-21, 2007. Expect to see lots of great Paparazzi systems kicking ass and taking names! August 28, 2007 Paul MacCready 1925-2007 Dr. Paul MacCready, legendary aeronautical engineer and founder of Aerovironment, died in his sleep at the age of 81. Many of us met him met him in 2005 at MAV05 in Germany but all of us are familiar with his incredible body of work ranging from the first human powered aircraft, to the GM Sunraycer electric car, and the world altitude record holding Helios. MacCready was a world champion sailplane pilot, holds a Cal Tech Ph.D. in aeronautics, has been granted 7 honorary degrees, and has contributed a total of 4 aircraft and one car to the permanent collection of the Smithsonian Institution. He founded Aerovironment in 1971, the world's largest supplier of hand-launched UAVs. August 21th, 2007 Flying south west of the Hofsjökull glacier Three Paparazzi equipped Funjets were part of the Flohof measurement campaign around the Hofsjökull glacier on Iceland. We were able to measure temperature, humidity, pressure and estimate the wind. The authorities issued a NOTAM, clearing the airspace up to 12.000 feet which allowed us to set a new Paparazzi altitude record. March 1st, 2007 Part of the ENAC multiplex foamy fleet Sun is finally back. We took all those babies for a multiple aircrafts flight. From left to right : 600g minimag, 900g twinjet, 600g funjet and 350g microjet. It's such a shame that multiplex stoped producing microjets..... they didn't even ask us :( February 5th, 2007 Download the video Jeremie Vacher, a student at ENAC, has developed a tracker for antennas. It is functionnal but still needs a little bit of polishing. Anybody interrested ? News Archives